


Fame 90

by HarveyWallbanger



Category: Velvet Goldmine
Genre: Alternate History, Deconstruction, Gen, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, The merging of fiction and reality
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-31
Updated: 2016-10-31
Packaged: 2018-08-28 03:04:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,740
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8429059
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HarveyWallbanger/pseuds/HarveyWallbanger
Summary: Same old thing, in brand new drag.





	

**Author's Note:**

> The title of this story comes from the song by David Bowie of the same name; the quote in the summary comes from Bowie's Teenage Wildlife.  
> In keeping with the content of the movie, a lot of this story is a mapping of real life events onto fictional characters in a fictional setting. As most of the story is composed of paraphrases, allusions and cheeky references, if something seems familiar to you, Dear Reader, it's meant to.  
> I am not involved in the production of Velvet Goldmine, and this school is not involved in the production of Velvet Goldmine. No one pays me to do this. Do not try any of this at home. Thank you, and good night.

The 80's pass like an afternoon nightmare: hot, close, and heavy. Bright. Sticky. It's such a relief when it's over. You're not the only one who thinks so. “It's the 90's,” is the new chant. It sounds constantly from every mouth. If people ran screaming from the 70's, as though from a movie monster, they turn on the 80's with torches and pitchforks. The 80's don't make it out of the 80's alive.  
You close the decade in disgrace. It's not the little journo's great revelation that does it, of course. That's easily kicked over. You're embarrassed, sort of contrite, in interviews. What it all comes down to, you say, is a desire for reinvention. Isn't that what we all want in the twentieth century? Isn't that, in fact, the American dream? “But you're not American,” one interviewer says- calculated to wound. You lean in conspiratorially. “Honey, it's the eighties,” you say- it was 1985, then- “we're all Americans, now. Anyway,” you add, “I just got tired of seeing that guy in the mirror. That blue-haired fairy. He started to seem like such a creep. Don't you think?” This shuts her up. You arch your brows triumphantly. Next week, it's yesterday's news. Everything eventually becomes yesterday's news, because everything eventually becomes yesterday.  
No- it's plain old mediocrity that does you in. Touring's a drag. Literally. It's a weight that sits on you, day in and day out- the pinwheeling destinations; the shuffling hotel rooms. The only thing that stays the same is the costume you wear. “The wonderful ice cream suit,” you sneer before the mirror in your dressing room. Shannon tells you you'd better not dare say that where anyone but she can hear. You love Shannon, but she's even less fun than Jerry, and has even less imagination than Cecil. Being an entertainer's the opposite of being a musician, of course, and really, you can't stand all this neo-realism, all these sad kids gently weeping on their fucking guitars, so, yeah, let the session musicians write the songs. You're too tired to do anything but rubber stamp them without complaint, and bang, there's your next album. All you have to do is show up and sing. The words are meaningless- but meaning is the opposite of entertainment.  
The public is not amused. The entertainment cycle's narrowing, and you're chronically on the bad side of this week's retro. In '88, you just give up. You stop touring. Indefinitely, you tell anyone who'll listen, your teeth grit like you can't feel your face- but you don't do that anymore. Your only drugs, now, are cigarettes, Perrier, and the defiance of the disdained. Shannon once told you that you were a salesman, and that you were your own product. You don't know why, but this resonated. Though, you were on cocaine at the time. You can't sell a product you don't believe in. You start playing with a bunch of jazz musicians, and everyone forgets your name. Even the guys in the band. Shannon thinks you're biding your time. At least it really is your time, now. You shall probably have a lot of it. It's something you're almost looking forward to: the living death of obscurity.  
But then, all hell breaks loose.  
It all comes down to the day after Christmas. The day after Christmas, every kid who got a crappy record from an uncool relative marches down to the mall, and exchanges it for something they really want. This is how a record- though, it's not records anymore, but CD's, now- called Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge, by a band called Mudhoney, rises to the top of the charts. When you hear them on the radio for the first time, playing something called “Let It Slide”- which has not yet, but will soon become inescapable- your blood runs cold. Your knees are weak. You're choked with- you don't know what. It's close to desire, but it's not that.  
It's envy.  
For the first time in years, in what feels like centuries- a mummified heart fluttering to life- you're envious. Why wasn't it me, you think nonsensically. It was you. Wasn't it?  
And you think of Curt. You wonder what he thinks of this. This blond boy- you'll find out that he's blond when you see the video, finally- with Curt's old haircut, is doing Curt's old act. A curiously, amusingly innocent version of Curt's old act, you must admit, because this boy keeps on all of his clothes, and seems to be as much a sexual black hole as Curt was a sexual luminary. It's an imperfect imitation, but the anger, the irreverence, the frustration are known to you. You remember them. You hurt. So much. At the sight of a beloved garment reduced to grotesque costume.  
After this, all of history is transfused with young blood. The corpse breathes again. You turn your nose up at guitars, and start looking at electronic music. It's come a long way since Jack Fairy was poking at synthesizers in the late 1970's, making all of those records that were alternately somniferent and emetic. A boy from Cleveland who's made his name with a harder, nastier version of the sound all but shows up on your doorstep, wanting to work together. He only mentions Maxwell the once, and you're grateful. It's only later that you find out that he has a name, at all. He takes you on tour with him. Teenagers in all black regard you hatefully with eyes ringed in kohl, throw trash and bottles of piss, scream for the headlining act. For the first time in a long time, you feel alive. Your new record grows out of the experience. You cut your hair. Turquoise hair dye is now easily found in shops. In the 70's, you had to use textile dye. You ruined Mandy's towels. She shrieked with laughter. Predictably, Shannon hates it. She hates everything, now. She keeps trying to herd you into respectability. She reminds you of what you once said, about reinvention. Look at that American fellow, she says, whose name escapes her: he went from arty freak to hard core junkie to sad alcoholic to “elder statesman of rock,” as the magazines dutifully call him. His partner's a serious lady performance artist. Public television airs his concerts. Look at Curt, she even says- desperate- citing his burgeoning career in independent film. He's been working with John Waters, Jim Jarmusch. He's been to Cannes. You aren't swayed. The critics take one look at you and call you an opportunist, a vulture, a vampire, a cannibal, a necrophiliac. You decide to take them literally, and your next album's darker, still. Opaque. Impenetrable. “Do you like girls or boys?” you sneer on one track. The collective gasp is all the more hilarious for the feigned boredom that follows.  
With age, though, come greater humiliations, still. Everything you do will become acceptable. It happens to Curt, who finds a gorgeously defiant track called “The Agony and the Ecstasy”, from one of the Berlin albums he made with Jack, being used to advertise everything from car dealerships to cruise lines. It gives Curt an infusion of new fame, when it's used in a trendy film about Scottish drug addicts, starring a desirably skinny young actor who looks enough like Curt to amuse you. They even get Curt, salvaged from pop and nostalgia, to star in a promotional video. He shrieks and writhes, his once lissome body now cadaverous. When you see his video for the first time on telly, without thinking, you lick the screen. If anyone gets to grope the old bones, it's you. Love among the dead is the most precious kind.  
Not that Curt's exactly dead. From what you understand, he's happy. Though, how he can be, at the “Okay to be gay” close of the 90's, after new plague has been demoted to manageable catastrophe, and the once unspeakable is now the merely awkward- how Curt, Curt who lived for and through his anger, could be happy, you just don't know. Or has he found something new to be angry about? Or is it just that, perhaps, you never really knew him, at all?  
Or you were more right than you initially thought. Curt is dead. The one you knew. The one who knew you. Long live Curt, you suppose.  
In '96, you sack Shannon. You can no longer stand to be managed. “Without me, you're nothing,” she hisses, incandescent, on her way out. For the first time, you think, you see her as she truly is: beautiful, and terrible. She must be on her mobile the second she leaves your flat, blabbing to the tabs. Almost immediately, she writes a tell-all. It's irritatingly well-researched. Cecil's long dead, but she acquired a lot of his papers. Mandy talked, though surprisingly little for Mandy. The journalist who outed you- himself, queer, and now with Curt, will wonders never cease- provided accounts of things you don't even remember doing, in places you don't even remember being. Though, of course, you must have been there.  
You're part of the news again. If sucking cock is news.  
It is, and it always has been. After everything that's happened, everything you've done, you'll only ever be remembered as a “gay icon”. Bisexual icons, of course, don't exist, because bisexuals don't actually exist. They're just something that everyone else made up to frighten themselves, with the horror of possibility. This makes you, you suppose, some sort of phantasm. They could just call you the holy ghost.  
Now, the final indignity, some kid wants to make a movie about you. Yet, you're the necrophiliac. He wants to call it “Lipstick Traces”. Use all your songs. The ones from the 70's, that is. You're instantly suspicious, and your suspicions are borne out- biographical films are either lovemaking or a punishment fuck. Of course, it's out of the question; you bar him access to your back catalog. It's like being asked to swing the hammer at your own crucifixion. Whatever the metaphor, you're damned if you'll be nailed. You can't fight him on the title, but he backs off from the rest, and has young, hip musicians write paste-and-glass versions of your songs. Brian Slade becomes a creature called “David Bowie”; his alien alter ego's called “Ziggy Stardust”.  
However do they invent these things?  
Though, one might also ask, however did you invent yourself?


End file.
